VII

The picturesque building had been there, just round the corner, all these years, without once attracting her interested notice. The question she directed towards it, crossing the road for a nearer view, went forth, not from herself, but from the presence, close at her side, of Michael Shatov. During the hour spent in her room, facing the empty evening, she had been aware of nothing, outside the startling disturbance of her own movements, but the immense silence he had left. Driven forth to walk away its hours out of doors, she found, accompanying her through the green-lit evening squares, the tones and gestures of his voice, the certainty, that so long as she should frequent the neighbourhood, she would retain the sense of his companionship. The regions within her, of unexpressed thought and feeling, to which he had not reached, were at once all about her as she made her old, familiar, unimpeded escape through the front door, towards the blur of feathery green standing in the bright twilight at the end of the grey street; but beyond these inner zones, restored in a tumult of triumphant assertion of their indestructibility, the outer difficult life of expression and association was changed. If, as she feared, he should finally disappear into the new world towards which, with such urgent irritated determination, she had driven him, she would, for life, have reaped a small fund of his Russian courage and indifference.⁠ ⁠… It was with his impulse and interest, almost it seemed, actually in his person, that she drew up in front of the placard at the side of the strange low ecclesiastical looking porch. But as she read its contents, he left her, sped into forgetfulness by the swift course of her amazement. She had come, leaving her room at exactly the right moment, directly, by appointment, to this spot. Glancing once more for perfect assurance, at the liberal invitation printed in large letters at the foot of the heavenly announcement, she went boldly into the porch.